The Media, Arts and Humanities Research Institute

In this talk we aim to outline a book we have been working on for over a decade now. The book articulates a radically new view of the avant-gardes spanning and intermingling the arts of Europe and North America and, to an increasing extent, globally from the early 20th century into the early 21st. Now in existence for over a century, such seemingly ephemeral artistic insurgencies have endured in a paradoxical way. A phenomenon repeatedly declared at its end during the past one hundred years, the artistic avant-gardes have reappeared consistently, bearing forth a series of seditious events that challenge received ideas about the social nature of art as well as about complacent period concepts and other historiographical categories used to frame the arts and explain their meanings. Discussing a wide and inclusive range of canonized but also lesser-known examples that span the visual and performance arts, architecture, literature, film, music, and more, and traversing the 20th century into the contemporary, we seek to reopen our understanding of more than a hundred years of artistic experiment and activism. Only, we argue, from this extended historical perspective of their intermittent yet recurrent appearance over many decades can we understand the noisy claims of avant-garde artists, works and practices, their social and historical meaning, and their long-term development.

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